Mister Match (The Match Series Book 1) (27 page)

Chapter
31

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T
hursday evening, Adam stared at the wall opposite the bed in his Seattle hotel room, where a large painting of flowers hung above the television.

The flowers were big and red, the only spot of color in a room that was otherwise all drab whites and grays.

He shifted his gaze enough to look out the window. Rain was dripping down the pane, silently, of course. Inside his room at the Regents Inn, all was expensive silence.

And loneliness was like an aching chasm that threatened to eat him alive from the inside out.

“Well, that was dramatic,” he muttered aloud. He shifted his gaze back again to contemplate the flowers. They were like a metaphor for Lisa—a splash of vibrancy in the dull, drab, tasteful, but utterly lifeless room that symbolized his dull, drab, tasteful, but utterly lifeless life.

Lisa was the only thing in his life that was truly vibrant and alive. She was his heart. And she’d hadn’t called, since he’d left her the message before the New Orleans Dream Date. It had been nearly a week, and she hadn’t made one attempt to get in touch.

She was probably going out on dates with a whole bevy of idiots, or worse. The thought of her with some jackass’s hands all over her pretty much burned him up. It made him want to puke and punch something at the very same time.

He did neither. Instead, he just lay there, feeling inert.

He was pretty sure today was Thursday. He’d lost track of days lately, one just seeming to bleed into the next. It was six o’clock in Seattle. He was sure of that, because the elegant clock on the bedside table said so. And it was rainy, of course. It was Seattle, after all.

That meant it was eight p.m. in Austin, and probably still sunny, even though it was early evening. Hot and uncomplicated. Just where he wanted to be, and he couldn’t feel farther away.

Dan had counseled him not to fly back to Austin to see Lisa. “Just let things be, for now,” he’d urged. “No more stirring the pot, all right? We can’t afford it.”

He’d meant the pot of trouble that was the press. Adam snorted. As if stirring things up had ever been his intention. And yet, he’d understood Dan’s sentiment. There was a certain wisdom in taking a step back, in purposely starving the paparazzi and the gossip bloggers and the celebrity news shows of any and all information or photo ops that might feed the beast. If they couldn’t photograph Adam and Lisa together, they couldn’t do anything more than speculate on their current relationship status. And speculation always died down over time, if it went long enough without anything solid to latch onto.

Besides, the New Orleans Dream Date had presented its own fires that had needed putting out. While Theo and Nina had been head over heels for each other—thank goodness, they hadn’t ended up being an Orlando and Valeria repeat—the gossip sites had pounced on Nina’s impromptu topless piano dance. How could they not? All it took was one customer in the hotel bar with a Smartphone and her semi-indecent photo was splashed all over the Internet, along with claims of “Another Dream Date Goes Bust” and “Has Mister Match Jumped the Shark?”

That one had made Adam laugh. Growing up, he’d been a huge Fonzie fan. Part of him was pretty proud of the
Happy Days
reference, though of course he understood it wasn’t a favorable one. In fact, whichever genius copywriter had penned that headline had been suggesting the Mister-Match Dream Date weekends were little more than a desperate marketing gimmick employed by a dating site that was already past its prime and on its way out.

The weird thing was, Adam just didn’t care anymore about all the negative press. All the chatter. It just didn’t matter to him as much as it had mere weeks earlier.

For one thing, he’d realized that he possessed a deep and abiding sense of trust in his creation, his baby, the Mister-Match matchmaking system. He believed in it. It worked. If people wanted to use it to build a solid, lasting relationship, that was great. If they didn’t, it was their loss.

That translated into a simple feeling of faith that everything with the website was going to work out. Sooner or later, this roller coaster ride would level out. The dating site would survive.

And even if it didn’t... Things changed. Life moved forward. Adam would ride the waves as they came, and adapt as needed. Maybe he would put his Master’s in Psychology to work writing a self-help book on what made relationships last. Or maybe he would capitalize on all the celebrity gossip and pen a tell-all about his experiences launching the fastest-growing dating site on the Web.

The future was wide open. But one thing that wouldn’t change was his feelings for Lisa. That was the other part of it all, the other reason he no longer cared about every critical gossip column or snarky Tweet that surfaced about Mister-Match.com: His attention was fully elsewhere, claimed by the woman he loved.

The woman who seemed perfectly able to leave him behind without so much as a goodbye.

A sudden spurt of determination coursed through him—or was it desperation? Either way, he was sick of moping around, feeling depressed because the woman he adored didn’t love him back.

The thing was, he didn’t know for certain that she didn’t love him back. He’d never asked her whether she did or not. And even though the idea of getting an answer he didn’t like filled him with pure, white-knuckled anxiety, he needed to know, one way or the other.

“Oh, grow a pair,” he snarled at himself. He sat up, grabbed his phone and found Lisa’s number in his contacts.

But at the last moment, he chickened out and tapped the little W at the right side of the screen instead. He located Willow’s number, and before he could change his mind, he tapped it and waited tensely, drumming his fingers against his thigh.

She picked up on the third ring.

“Willow? It’s Adam. Adam Masters.”

“Adam.” She sounded surprised. “Hello. How are you? Still in Seattle?”

He’d spoken to Clare earlier in the week, when she’d called to follow up on the Jacob situation. He’d gotten the sense there had been some other subtext to her call, but he hadn’t been able to figure out what. Either way, she must have told Willow where he was.

“I’m still here,” he said, striving to sound casual. “Flying to San Francisco tomorrow morning for an interview, and then D.C. later in the day for the next Dream Date. Look... I’m calling to find out how Lisa is doing. I mean, if you’ve heard from her.”

“Heard from her?” she asked. “Since when? I mean, I talk to her every day.”

“Since—” He let out a short sigh. “I guess that’s not exactly what I mean. I’m—I’m just calling to find out how she is.”

There was a pause.

“Why don’t you call her,” Willow suggested, “and ask her directly?”

Adam scowled. Willow had such a gentle way of forcing him to be honest. “Look, she and I aren’t exactly... Our relationship is sort of—” He stopped, cleared his throat and tried again. “I haven’t spoken to her in a while.” It had been exactly eleven days, but who was counting?

“Adam,” Willow said gently, “why don’t you tell me why you’re really calling.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and sighed. Well, he’d already gone to the trouble of calling her and making extremely awkward conversation. He might as well come out with the truth.

“Has she been going out on more dates?”

He blurted it out, quickly, before he could lose his nerve and pretend it wasn’t on his mind every minute of the day—the idea of Lisa dating other men, and maybe even enjoying it.

There was a pause. He could almost hear Willow’s surprise through the phone.

“Look, I just— I know the dates with those two other guys didn’t work out, and I just wondered—I mean, I don’t want her going out with some jerk. I don’t want her to get hurt.”

That part, at least, was true. It just wasn’t the whole truth.

“What exactly are you asking me to do?” Willow asked, her tone cautious.

Adam huffed out a breath. This was going swimmingly.

“I know you and Clare were vetting her matches on the website,” he said. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but if you’re still checking out the guys she dates before she goes out with them, maybe you could do a little better job at it, because I think those first two were pretty much a bust, and Lisa deserves to be happy.”

“Oh, Adam. Sweetie.”

Her pitying tone made his skin crawl.

“I don’t need you to feel sorry for me,” he said, “or whatever it is you’re feeling right now.” He frowned down at the floor, and then told the whole truth. “Willow, I’m in love with her. And it doesn’t really seem like she feels the same way about me. Which I get. I pretty much screwed everything up from the start, by lying about our relationship and then getting Lisa to go along with this whole ridiculous engagement scheme, and...” He blew out a breath and ran a hand roughly through his hair. “And now I haven’t talked to her in a while, and I have no idea whether she’s been thinking about me at all, or if she’s hanging out with other men, or if she’s just living her life and not even worrying about any of this crap. And meanwhile, here I am, hanging in the balance, waiting for her to decide the fate of the rest of my life.”

He muttered the last part. He hadn’t even meant to put it into words, but there it was, heavy, raw and not at all pretty.

“You love Lisa?” Willow asked.

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Of course I love her. What did you think? That I was asking if she’s been dating other guys out of some petty jealousy fit?”

“No,” she said slowly. “I just wasn’t sure if you understood the depth of your feelings for her.”

“Of course I do,” he said shortly. “I fell in love with her pretty much the first time we met. She feels like...” He didn’t know how to describe it. Lisa felt as familiar as family to him. She felt like his other half. Like someone he’d been waiting for all his life without even knowing it. Finding her had felt like something finally clicking into place.

“She feels like the one,” he said, for lack of a better word.

“All right, then,” Willow said, sounding decisive and excited.

He frowned. All right, then, what?

“I’ll tell you how she’s really doing, but you can’t tell her I told you.” Willow paused. “In fact, don’t even tell her we’ve spoken. It’ll just be easier that way.”

“Great. Fine.” What was another lie? His stomach was doing flip-flops. He felt like something big was about to happen. Big-good or big-bad, he couldn’t tell.

“So you already know she didn’t connect with Reese or Jacob, which was no surprise. It just wasn’t in their charts.”

He frowned. “Their charts? You mean, their medical charts?”

Willow laughed. “No, their birth charts. Astrology. I read the birth charts of every man on Mister-Match.com that we considered setting Lisa up with. I didn’t want to take any chances. But still, you never know. Astrology can reveal a great deal, but there’s always that wild card, the possibility of a—”

“A DNA match,” Adam finished, suddenly remembering what Lisa had told him about their code word for inexplicable, overwhelming attraction.

“That’s right.” Willow sounded surprised. “You know about that?”

“Lisa told me about it, a while back.” He shook his head. “Wait, you read all of their astrological charts?”

“I’m an astrologer,” she said. “Well, I’m not accredited, yet. But I’m working toward accreditation, and I’m quite serious about it.”

“Could you tell from that Reese guy’s chart that he was a stick in the mud?”

“Certainly. Well, I had a pretty good idea. He’s a Cancer, while Lisa’s a Virgo. Normally that’s a very solid match, though not a very exciting one. Except Reese also had several key planets in Capricorn, including a Saturn-Mars conjunction in the tenth house, which adds in some very serious, paternalistic, controlling energy. Lisa has several planets in Taurus and Gemini, along with her Virgo sun. She needs someone who can add some excitement to her life, not more of the same efficiency and caution that she’s already got enough of on her own. She needs someone who knows how to have fun, how to indulge in life, and who won’t try to tell her how to live hers.”

“Huh. Okay.” Most of that was gobbledygook to him—the Saturn-conjunction-house mumbo jumbo, in particular—but the concept of bringing fun and excitement to Lisa’s life, he could definitely get, and get behind. “And that guy’s been out of the picture since their first date, weeks ago. Right?”

“Yes. And then, there was Jacob.”

“Jacob,” Adam repeated darkly. He already knew far more about Jacob than he’d ever wanted to know.

“Right,” Willow said. “I expected he would be much too unreliable for Lisa—he’s got a Sagittarius sun plus a stellium of planets in Gemini, in the fifth house, no less—but I didn’t anticipate the blackmailing scheme. Although, I should have. All that trickster Gemini energy can easily override the Sagittarian honesty and take dual-naturedness to the more extreme level of duplicity.”

Adam blinked. “Sure. Of course. Makes perfect sense. Except one thing.”

“Which part?”

He shook his head. “You said Reese’s birth chart showed he would be too much of a stick in the mud for Lisa, and Jacob’s showed he would be too unreliable.”